View in Google Earth

The Thematic Mapping Blog inspired me to experiment a little with the visualization of statistics with 3D-symbols. On the Statbel website I found the population numbers of all Belgian municipalities. Statbel made everything a little more easy by providing geographic coordinates of the municipalities, with a precision of '2.000 meter from the townhouse'.

Every municipality is represented by a cone which height is proportional to the municipalities population. To avoid screen clutter, only the names of the most populous municipalities are shown when zoomed out. Zooming in causes the names of less populous municipalities to show. In the table of content the municipalities are organised by province and are ordered by population.

Population of the municipalities of the Antwerp province

Every municipality is also represented by an icon which, when clicked, opens a balloon that contains the exact total population (2006), the place of the municipality on the national ranking and a graph that shows the number of inhabitants with Belgian nationality and with other nationality.